Hey everybody, I just wanted to post my (slightly abbreviated) impressions of these having spent a couple of weeks with them. There's a running thread also over at horen.lifeme.net if you'd like to see what some other people have thought.
My first impression was that they were a bit larger than I imagined. And HEAVY. With NoRez installed the deeper L/R speakers come in at over 52lbs each! These are as solid as it gets. The finish is exactly what you would expect. It's the same rosewood that was on all the Onix Reference speakers.
The first thing I noticed when I hooked them up and turned them on was the detail and imaging. Before any room correction with YPAO or tinkering with receiver settings at all I immediately could understand dialog on tv programming better. Also I noticed that when I began tinkering with receiver settings and set distances for the speakers, I could hear distinct changes in the soundstage with every .5' of adjustment. With my AV123 RS450's and RSC100mkii (which I wasn't really unhappy with at all) I could barely tell it was changing anything. I had to move the distance setting towards or away from me by several feet to hear a change, and even then it was a matter of finding best coherency, not a clear shift in phase with every step. The soundstage with the LCR's is just so much more precise, with so much better separation of voices and layering of parts that every change was noticed, as if a guitar player had walked just to his left or right, or the vocalist was swaying side to side. Also, the bass was as quick and controlled as anything I've ever heard. Owing itself largely to the top notch cabinetry, there was NEVER a bloated note ad ANY point during my listening over the next week.
I was keenly interested in whether or not my Yamaha RX-V663 could effectively push the three speakers. I began playing miscellaneous music selections through them at moderate volumes. (note: playback was through a Squeezebox 3's digital output to my receiver. All songs were lossless rips) I know everybody who upgrades says this and it's become incredibly cliche, but well, I could hear things I'd never heard before. I heard harmony lines that had been mushed together before. I heard the decay rates of the reverb used by the recording engineer. I even heard a few "mistakes" that were buried enough in the mix as to not warrant fixing. In any case, these are revealing speakers. They resolve a fantastic amount of detail. This is owed not only to the quality drivers, but to the high quality crossover parts used and the NoRez treatment that eliminates a lot of midrange smearing. I cranked them up, and the Yammy handled it admirably. It did start to compress a little, but it didn't overheat, shut down, or sound awful, and this was full-range so crossed over to a sub it would be much easier. I think $400-$500 receivers will do just fine for with these for HT duty in all but the largest rooms so long as you have a sub.
That Friday night after a bunch of yard work, we decided to rent a movie so I could test them out with blu-ray audio before packing them up for a GTG. We rented Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, partly because we were in the mood for an action/adventure type movie, and partially because I'd heard it sounds pretty good. I promised my wife I'd do a minimum of adjusting and tinkering during the move, but I did have to change a couple of things right off the bat. For one thing, I no longer needed to run the center hot to keep voices intelligible. I set the three speakers dead even and didn't have to reach for the volume once during the quietest or loudest scenes. Dialog was completely clear the whole time. Next, I was able to cross my MFW-15 over lower than with my RS450's. They are rated at 37hz on the low end, but when I cross them over below 80hz, they tend to sound a little thin. The LCR's comfortably crossed over at 60hz for HT and 40hz for music. Their bass was so much better than the sub I wanted it down as far as possible. Everything was correctly in place across a seamless front stage, and sounds seemed to come out of the walls sometimes. I greatly enjoyed using these for HT and am now a bit ruined for my current system. If I had any complaints at all, I felt there was occasionally a touch of "glare," for lack of a better term, in the upper midrange area. More on that below...
In my 2-channel listening, both at home (with an Onix CD-10 and XIA-160 front end) and at the gtg I mentioned above (All McIntosh front end) I found them to image well and present everything appropriately. Bass is quite good, but you have to get them cranking a little before it really does its thing. Music was definitely more dynamic with such great amplification, but I didn't feel like my inexpensive receiver was unworthy or anything like that. I did, however, encounter that same glare at times - especially initially when my gear was in a spare room that was untreated and with large windows on one wall. A cabinet tweak recommended by Danny Richie resolved that issue, and at this point I find them quite smooth in response.
Other notes:
--My CRT revealed pretty quickly that the center channel speaker isn't shielded. I'd be curious to know how many people would care about that so we can see if it needs to be addressed.
--They are very deep. The L/R version of the speakers is 16" deep and need to be a certain distance from the wall. (although I found few ill-effects from having them only about 8" from the wall for a bit) The "C" speaker is only 12" deep, which makes it more flexible, but will have little less low bass extension. I'm recommending to Hugh that we allow people to mix and match as much as possible. Some will want the big ones for fronts and the small ones for center and surrounds. Some will need the shallower model all around. Some may even want all deep models if they've go the space. That sort of thing will sort itself out though. The bottom line though is that if you've got room for open baffle you've got room for a 16" deep cabinet, so I think there will be quite a few people who can make it work just fine.
